


Fortress

by fluorescentgrey



Series: Cryptograms [3]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Character Study, M/M, Young Love, what to do when your crush turns evil
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-07
Updated: 2016-01-07
Packaged: 2018-05-12 08:06:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,039
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5658871
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fluorescentgrey/pseuds/fluorescentgrey
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ghostships unmoored and drifting.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fortress

General Organa’s son was in the darkened video chamber at the old library watching dashcam footage from ancient wars with nearly his whole narrow fine-boned face swallowed by the oculus device. Still somehow he knew it was Poe when Poe came in, and he said, “Dameron.” 

“Hi Ben,” he said. The mindless hummingbird wingbeat flutter he ignored. He went for the files of x-wing racing footage against the far wall. 

At first the screen was black while it loaded. In the reflection he watched while Ben took the big oculus helmet off; his hair was long and soft and disheveled, his eyes bright and wild, and something was on the tip of his sharp pink tongue. His lips were chapped so his mouth was very red. He held the oculus helmet gently in his spidery hands, and he was watching at Poe’s back like he often did in some inscrutable way though likely, even then — he was sixteen — he could have gotten in Poe’s head hardly trying. And on bad days Poe wondered if perhaps he already had. 

The footage loaded and Poe pretended to peruse it. Ben got up and Poe heard him file away whatever he’d been looking at. The stepping shadow of him in the room was long and quiet, stretching dusk. He had begun about a year ago to wear black head to toe and it suited him inasmuch as it made him look very tall, and very thin, and very pale, and in it his freckles stood out like a blood spatter on his face. He looked like he’d been carved from stone or something like the ancient gods of some other world and the neck of his shirt was open just a little at the collarbone. 

He went out through the sliding door and Poe found suddenly he could breathe again but the air tasted like smoke. 

\--

He did not know when exactly it had begun to happen and he also knew with certainty that Ben resented his very existence. Still the desperate hunger and the dreams. It was like walking eternally in the presence of some ghost, or half-asleep or drunk; he wrecked three simulations in a row and nearly a real vessel, he slept twelve hours a night, twice a day at least he was obliged to excuse himself to the restroom to get himself off in under thirty seconds. For about a week he was convinced it was something Ben had done with the Force to spite him and he became so certain and so terrified that he asked General Organa’s brother if it were possible. And Skywalker said, with a gentle and forgiving kindness that suggested he had answered this question very many times before, that it was not. 

\--

Likely nobody else noticed because no one else watched Ben with such fervor but it seemed those days there was some particular cloud hovering about his head that Poe took it upon himself to dissipate. At least to seek its origin. Ben had come to walk around with his eyes fixed upon the ground and he looked as though he were trying to understand the world anew from the soil up. At anyone who spoke to him including his masters he leveled a withering glare Poe found disconcertingly attractive. He was always in the library watching dashcam and newsreel footage and would depart quickly whenever interrupted. 

It was the late Spring and it was dusk and Poe had had enough of the quotidian gutting and followed him. He was sitting on the library steps watching at the sunset as though he loathed it and he did not even look up when the door closed. 

Poe sat down; his heart was doing something. “What’s happening to you?” 

Whatever was could not be approached by words. But it was nearly like being eaten, being swallowed. Consumed and devoured. The juice and marrow sucked out from the bones. 

He could not help their kiss; it was like a black spark of something and a spreading rushing wildfire. The universe rushed into him like it did when he flew. Atmosphere broken. Stars rushing at the windscreen. 

At first he thought Ben might punch him but instead he leaned in every bend of his long body again. 

\--

He went walking in the forest with Ben, who wore his traditional Jedi dress of a plain sandy taupe and thus looked almost like some other person. Poe had come from the airfield but had undone his orange suit so the jacket part hung around his waist; it was dusk, and earlier in the day it had finally rained for about thirty seconds and the wood was humid and fragrant with green things and the sounds of birds. “What does it feel like to fly,” said Ben, pointedly looking away from him. 

“Good,” Poe said. “I think it’s the best feeling in the world.” 

The lovely and severe brow tightened and Poe realized maybe that was not the best way to have put it. 

“You can look,” he said, attempting mediation. “You can go in my brain and look.” 

Ben stopped walking and his eyes got big and dark. All of a sudden in the forest it was very silent. Later Poe would think perhaps it all stemmed from this exact moment. When he spoke it was almost with some strange melody. “You would let me do that to you?” 

“Yes,” Poe said, because at the time he was in love. “I trust you.” 

Ben chewed his lips redder and refused to speak further upon the subject. They walked on. It was months before Poe dared broach the subject again. 

\--

“Poe?”

Ben was at the window. He had opened it, just a crack, from the outside with only his mind. By the clock it was long before dawn. “What is it?” 

“Can I come in?” 

He would always ask, like a vampire. 

Ben took his shoes off and got in bed with him. He was trembling very finely like a last leaf. 

“What happened?” 

“I don’t know.” 

He turned onto his side and so did Poe until they were very close and facing each other in the narrow bed and the moonlight in triplicate came through the window broken by its panes and illuminating a white frost upon the blankets. Something was eclipsing far back, galactic deep in Ben’s eyes and Poe reached for him and thumbed his cheekbone and they kissed and the eyes fluttered closed. 

“What’s happening to you?” 

Ben was holding his elbow tightly and the himself come back to his face was a little frightened but mostly resigned. “There’s a voice in my head.” 

“Does it tell you what to do?” 

“Yes. I haven’t been listening. But.” 

It was all over for good when he said _but_. 

“It’s like — ” and his voice was so quiet now it was almost no voice at all. “I can’t keep — the wolf from the door…” 

“Yes you can,” said Poe, but he was not sure that he believed it. He threaded his fingers in the short soft hair at the back of Ben’s neck. Sometimes touching him like this he thought he could feel the Force. But maybe it was just love. 

“I can’t,” he said, “Poe. Not for much longer; I can’t, I can’t — ” 

He kept saying it as Poe embraced him and finally he quieted and his arms settled about Poe’s shoulders. Poe did not sleep again and he wasn’t sure if Ben did either but eventually the sound of his breath evened out. His nose was sharp and cold against the joint between Poe’s neck and shoulder. 

\--

They walked in the forest. “I can’t tell you what it says,” said Ben. 

“I know it’s not you. I won’t think any worse of you.” 

They walked on in silence. Finally, as though it were very obvious: “I don’t know that it’s not me.” 

He would not be saved. He was like some ghostship unmoored and drifting. 

\--

Poe had never been tempted in all his life before and when all was said and done he was never tempted again, but when it finally happened it was like someone had looped a tether around his heart and began to pull. The way they would tie ships down in the big star destroyers with braided steel cables a foot thick such that even with a flux capacitor or hyperspeed capability you had to shoot the rope though with the good shit to get it to let go. Ben looked so pale the whites of his eyes seemed blue like skim milk veined through with red for all he hadn’t slept, and he wore his cloak such that his face was nearly all shadow. When he reached to hold Poe’s wrist he wore soft black leather gloves. And he pressed two fingers up upon the pulse like he often did and Poe would wonder later if through the fabric he could even feel it. Or if he had one himself anymore. Or if he had ever had one. 

“Come with me,” he said. “Please come with me.” There was a wet glow in his dark eyes beneath the hood. He could have made Poe do it if he wanted to and for a moment he feared it would come, the interlocutor in his mind, Ben’s delicate hand pulling strings, cloves burning. But instead Ben said again, “Come with me. Please.” He was crying for real now and on the sharp cold face it looked almost wrong that he could fear. “I love you.” 

He might as well have got his weapon out from his belt and ripped it up through Poe’s gut. But still he was emboldened enough to say it again. “I love you and I — if you were with me — ” 

We could rule the universe. 

A chill went all up through him where his heart had frozen solid. 

“He needs pilots. And you could be the general of your own battalion.” 

“He’s your voice?” 

“He’s the most powerful thing that’s ever — ” 

“Except for you.” 

Ben let go his hand. No new tears on his face but the soft fading salt tracks of the old ones. When he spoke it shimmered with his power. “Except for me.” 

\--

He recalled sometimes — they had never gotten all that far when it came to sex, but the first time he made Ben come, the window shattered. 

“Sorry,” Ben gasped, “sorry, so sorry.” 

“It’s alright.” He thought he might die. The fierce joy, and his heart pounding. It was like running some trick pattern in one of the training junkers that wouldn’t break mach 6. He couldn’t breathe, in the gravity… Ben was naked and he lay upon his back in Poe’s tangled blankets with his knees akimbo, and he looked like some artwork or something from very long ago, and the light came in tender afternoon through the jagged glass. “It’s alright,” Poe said again; he was convincing himself. 

Ben propped himself up on his elbows and leaned up; he was smiling a little, and they kissed again. His hand pressed Poe’s belly, long and cold, and then lower. 

\--

The next time he saw Ben he could only tell for certain it was indeed him by the inflection in the voice beneath the modulator. He wore nearly enough richly textured black layers to hide how delicate he was. Not an inch of pale skin showed, nor a single freckle, nor a lock of his hair. And the mask, which was beat up, like he himself rather was not. 

It was a pity, because he had been very beautiful, and likely he still was, and likely he hated it about himself. 

God fucking damn it, Poe nearly said aloud. 

“Dameron,” said Ben. 

“Hey, old buddy.” 

Long ago after much wheedling he had convinced Ben to reach in his mind to show him what it felt like but he only managed for a moment after which he had quickly and sheepishly withdrawn. In that it was rather like their one aborted attempt at penetrative sex, except that time it had been Poe sheepishly withdrawing. And he hadn’t had to do it with that stupid gesture. 

\--

He woke to voices, was freed and nearly killed many times subsequently. The agent of his escape was a rogue stormtrooper with no name and a dab hand with a TIE blaster whose company he rather enjoyed until they were shot down once more upon desert hell. 

His flight jacket was lost. He walked. When he slept — in the day, in the shade cast by wreckage, unidentifiable ancient wreckage like some iron temple — he dreamt, rather surprisingly, of Ben, who he had not dreamed of now for perhaps a decade. In the dream they were always sixteen together on D’Qar in the spring rains, and he was feeling kind of bad, because he missed Yavin, where it really rained, and he missed his family, who by then were dead, and because he was holding in his arms the only thing he had ever gotten that he wanted, or so he thought, at the same time he was losing it very slowly like by increments, like some dust thing blowing apart, and at the center he knew even then there was only darkness. 

He walked and imagined he could really fly. He imagined he spent so much time in a cockpit that he melted into it and the engine became his heart and the x-wings became his arms and the windshield his eyes and all the pretty chromatic lawful and organized guts his guts — and he wondered what it would be like if there was nothing, no mediator, between himself and the universe. Then he wondered if that was maybe what it felt like to be Ben. 

He walked on in the suffocating heat. At a stinking sulphuric well he drank and dry heaved thrice and drank again. He kept thinking he heard BB-8 but it was always just some other bizarre animal, or the metal parts of an old ship swinging together in the strange wind. 

\--

The tides were changing — the multiversal ebb and flow, pacing now in some altogether different way. Washed up again and again like flotsam against the swollen midnight moon. He thought he could feel it just in the taste of the air — the texture of it against his face. 

He could not bear to think he might miss it when he sometimes feared he had been instrumental in its beginning. He walked through the graveyard of ships and nonsensically called for BB-8. 

In the end he got off planet in the shittiest craft that would break atmosphere which he had received in exchange for a blowjob. “Sucks how little sex is worth these days,” he said spitefully aloud to the dusty cockpit. 

\--

After the fact he had spent some time grieving and gradually the severe aching hurt and the blackened blood-rotting bruise that encased his heart began to fade into hatred, terrible and suffocating burning hatred that consumed him like some fever for days on end. At first it was hatred of the darkness, and of Snoke, but he eventually found he hated Ben, and he hated what Ben had done to him, and he hated that he had grieved for so long, and he hated that he had been so besotted to begin with. Of course when it was all happening he had excused the mysterious and unexplained absences and the endless messages that went unresponded to and the aloofness even when they were together and all the time Ben had spent begging to be held in one piece as though he did not know soon he would come apart anyway. And he had never offered to return the favor though he must have seen — he must have felt — what he did to Poe. Within a year’s time he had convinced himself that Ben had been using him since their first kiss on the steps of the library. He pushed himself so hard at training he passed out from hunger during a test flight and nearly totaled a brand-new craft in the desert scrub of the unnamed world he was meant to be circumnavigating. 

At some juncture he became the best pilot in the Resistance and was given a medal by General Organa. She pinned the imprinted titanium sphere upon his chest and in her deep warm eyes she could read him even without the Force. She gave a speech thereafter to the assembly that had gathered honoring Poe among others of his battalion and he could not stop thinking, I tried to fuck your son back into goodness. Really I tried, and I failed. 

He thought about going to her chambers and asking for her forgiveness. Instead he lay in bed that night and thought about the long-ago occasion of the attempted fucking. In the interim he had become rather accomplished in the act despite his memory of the initial foray — it was summer (it was always, always, always fucking summer) and it was dusk, and the wind through the open window smelled like rain, rain not having happened but coming, and he took his very sweet time with Ben, his warm red inside and his mouth, Vaseline, kissing, kissing like they would fall into one another, always looking each other direct in the fucking eyes, and Ben looked like he would have taken his heart or what remained of it in those days and put it in Poe’s hands, or in Poe’s mouth, and Poe would have carried it around gently inside himself without chewing, like a droid with a data shard… Finally Ben begged a little for it in a way that was endearing and Poe obliged him for all of fifteen seconds until Ben’s eyes in the darkness expanded six sizes and Poe felt in the room some swelling black shadow breathing down his back and Ben shoved at his shoulders until he pulled out. “I’m sorry,” Poe was saying, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” like an idiot, sitting on his heels holding his cock in the gray dusk light. Ben sat up, he covered his mouth with his hand; he was breathing nine thousand miles a minute. “Did I hurt you,” said Poe, not wanting to hear the answer, and Ben laughed, a horrible sound. “No,” he said, and there was something different in his voice, modulated, infernal echo, even then, God, even from his flesh, from his boy’s mouth then. “It felt so — but I would have killed you.” 

Then they lay together in the darkness and Poe was so tired; he was so so very tired but he could not sleep.

\--

His droid of course was with the stormtrooper back on D’Qar. The stormtrooper, Finn, who was wearing his jacket. 

Poe had returned to find the six worlds of the Republic had been annihilated. They did not have much time to catch up before troops were called to order. The First Order had taken a girl and she was strong with the Force though she hardly knew it. He remembered being young and awed by it, by power; now it seemed like a burden. 

Finn caught him up on the proceedings rather breathlessly over a quick meal — instant bread with melted Bantha cheese and a pink, fizzy caffeine supplement — they shared in the mess hall. To see him alive was a kind of soaring and unexpected joy Poe had not been prepared for in the slightest, as was the fact that his own old flight jacket looked like something Finn had owned all his life and worn soft. “It suits you,” he’d said; he hadn't meant to be flirty, but it had come out that way. Probably anything Finn wore would suit him on account of how good he looked. 

This was not the time to consider that or anything of its ilk. Even if they got out of the battle alive they certainly would not make it out of the war. He recalled distantly that that had never stopped him before. 

They suited up again and flew out. It was not the first time he had gone after Ben with blasters and it would not be the last. He was not sure that he was altogether over it or that he ever would be. But it helped to have a plane, and a stocked gunnery, and a battalion. 

\--

Finn came back but not, and so did the girl, Rey, who shook his hand; hers was callused and warm, and in her soft eyes she had seen a lot unfathomable, and she said that she had cut Ben’s face, and then the earth split her away. “I think I would have killed him,” she said, “I don’t know. And I’m scared of the not knowing.” 

He hardly knew her. They were sitting at Finn’s bedside and for two days now he had not moved. And that evening Rey would leave for Ahch-to, across the universe, in a ship whose captaincy she had inherited. 

He happened to have a flask of brandy on his person because he usually did and he passed it to her. When she took a sip her face made him laugh. “If you kill Kylo Ren,” he said, and it felt wrong; it had always felt wrong, “He’ll deserve it. But I don’t think you deserve to be a killer.” 

She looked at him then like she knew. Perhaps she did. He dared her to know. But she said nothing on the subject and instead she looked at Finn’s face, and at his chest, at its clockwork motion, assisted by machinery, and she said, “Will you sit with him while I’m gone?” 

\--

For days he did; he rose for meals, and to work on his plane, and to talk logistics, and draft amorphous plans, in the great held breath between the motion and the act. And when he did not do that he sat by Finn’s bed in the medical bay and drank brandy and watched old x-wing racing footage. He waited for Rey, and for the sky to open up and tell him what to do, and he waited for it all to go bad like there was something rotten spreading from the very heart of him, and he waited, as he had perhaps been waiting for most of his life, to wake up from the dream. Except before he could wake, Finn did. 

It was past midnight. Finn struggled to sit up and perhaps Poe shouldn’t’ve helped him but he did. In his white hospital gown he looked strong, and handsome and very tired, and very confused, and his skin was lovely; it was so dark and smooth it was bright in the fluorescent overheads. My ex almost killed you, Poe nearly said. “Are you alright?” 

“My back feels funny.” 

“They had to regrow half your skin. Don’t — don’t try and feel it.” 

They laughed. He wasn’t sure why. 

They played cards til dawn. He told Finn where Rey’d gone and watched his brow furrow. 

\--

Who could say what would happen? They walked in the woods. The paths were different. He thought, if I ever wake up, it will be now. Wake up, he thought, wake up, wake up, but Finn took his hand. “Alright?” 

“Deja vu.” 

They walked on. Finn’s palm was sweaty. Both their heartbeats were stuck in the space between their hands. Finally he said “Poe.” 

“Yeah?” 

“What’s it like to be a pilot?” 

The dream…

“Gravity,” he said. “You’re suspended but your stomach’s falling out. Somewhere you’re terrified because the universe could eat you any second. But also it’s like — joy. Like melted butter. I don’t know; did someone tell you to ask me that?” 

“No. I’ve wanted to know.” 

“I could take you up — ” 

Finn leant in and kissed him and he let himself fall toward it. Like a civilization. 

\--

The breath held; the fortress held. He slept. He woke in the quarters that had been assigned to Finn when the sun through the clouds and the window struck across his face. And for a moment he was unsure when and where and who he was, until he turned on his back in the bed and remembered. 

**Author's Note:**

> i'm really sorry, but i thought poe needed a tragic backstory to match finn's and rey's. 
> 
> this is kind of a sequel to [red ink](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5624245). like that story i could not have done it without [reserve](http://archiveofourown.org/users/reserve/pseuds/reserve), and [imochan](http://archiveofourown.org/users/imochan/pseuds/imochan). title is borrowed from [this pinback song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59cQWw9ctOA), although the tone of this story is way more ["AFK."](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGcNWVhsViE)
> 
> this is part 3 of a series-to-be whose final piece is forthcoming eventually. i tag it with "red right hand" on [my tumblr](http://yeats-infection.tumblr.com/) \- join me for mild sin


End file.
